Linus Personal Finance Tools Review

Breadth of Services

Let’s just say Linus is focused. The company’s consumer product line consists of one product—a high-yield account that offers an interest rate up to 64 times the national savings account average. But sometimes, breadth of services isn’t what you’re looking for. You’re looking, instead, for the company that provides the one service you need and is really good at what they do. For people who are interested in getting their feet wet—or eventually investing more fully in the cryptocurrency market—Linus might be that one company.

Screenshot from getlinus.io September 15, 2020

Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are pretty technical stuff. And yet, if you read the financial news, you know that lots of people are making money by investing in it. Perhaps you’ve been tempted yourself, but you’ve been put off the opportunity because the concept of cryptocurrency seems foreign and ethereal. You can’t stuff it under your mattress or spend it at Whole Foods. Then there are the myriad choices. Which currency should you invest in? Once you own it, when should you trade it or cash it in entirely for regular, familiar greenbacks? Can you even do that?

Linus provides people who can’t get their minds around cryptocurrency a simple way to invest in digital asset credit markets. To put it simply, the money you put in your Linus account is tokenized. Specifically, Linus tokenizes your dollar into USDC, a digital dollar that is backed one-to-one by U.S. Dollars. Once your deposit is tokenized, Linus is able to connect with borrowers in digital asset credit markets. There, it earns interest at a higher rate than traditional fiat currency—the kind we’re all familiar with—can typically fetch in traditional markets. That’s how Linus can offer an impressively high interest rate on its deposit account. 

But from the account holder’s perspective, all that digital asset stuff is invisible. You deal in dollars only when you make deposits and withdrawals or check your Linus account balance, just like you do with a traditional savings account. Unless you want to, you needn’t understand anything about cryptocurrency. That’s the thinking Linus does for you.

Educational Resources

Linus doesn’t publish much of a blog on its website at this time. Most of the articles cover company news or relate directly to using the service. The company does a very good job of explaining how the features and benefits of its product. However, it appears there is an underlying assumption at work here: that customers don’t want to know much about blockchain and cryptocurrency. That certainly may be true of some, but others might want to educate themselves on the subject and keep up with market trends, regulations, and more. We’d like to see Linus provide more financial education than it currently does on its website, but, again, Linus is a young company, and that feature may be coming down the road.

Pricing

It costs nothing to open or manage a Linus account. You can move your money as often as you like without penalties. You can also withdraw your money at any time. Linus protects the principal amount you deposit in your account—which seems to make working with Linus a pretty safe proposition—but we should remind you that a Linus account is an investment account and no investment is entirely without risk. But barring a an economic collapse of grave proportions, it’s tough to find much downside to taking advantage of Linus’ high return on your deposit.

Screenshot from getlinus.io September 15, 2020

Customer Experience

Linus’ website is cleanly laid out and it’s pretty easy to find the product information you’re looking for. Linus encourages you to open an account by providing just your name and email address—no financial information or bank account information required. Once you do, you can take a look at the Linus dashboard, which is very simple. If you decide you want to make a deposit in your account, Linus then asks you to verify your identity. You’ll provide a little more contact information and some form of government ID. Next, the website uses the camera in your computer to photograph you and your ID. Once your identity is confirmed, Linus will send you an email letting you know that you can make a deposit in your account. All of that takes about 15 minutes. Deposits can be made using a debit card or via ACH transfer. Linus doesn’t “link” an external account to its own account 

Linus does not have a mobile app. To use the service, you can access the company’s website via computer or by using your smartphone browser. The company states that a mobile app is coming soon.

Linus has a chat feature on its website that under-promises and over-delivers. Once you start a chat, you’re told that it may take a while for someone to be with you. It only took a minute, in our case, to reach a live human, who was well-informed, polite, and willing to answer quite a few questions. 

Linus’ maintains a strong privacy policy. The company will share your information as required to deliver the services you sign up for and by law. It may also share your contact information with the marketing partners it engages to promote its own products to you. However, Linus does provide the opportunity to opt out from marketing messages altogether.

Reputation

Linus is a very new company—less than a year old at the time of this review. However, the company earns an excellent rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot. Linus is not rated by the BBB. We noted that Linus didn’t show up in a lot of “top ten savings accounts” round-up articles published by traditional sources and, yet, the company offers interest rates that blow traditional savings accounts out of the water. The few articles we read came from publications that focused on the cryptocurrency market, where Linus received favorable reviews.

Linus Summed Up

Along with the cryptocurrency rags-to-riches stories you’ve probably heard, chances are you’ve heard tales of some investors losing their shirts in the crypto market. All investments involve risk, of course, and the ones with the greatest potential for return are generally the riskiest. But Linus isn’t promising sky-high gains—just a much better deal than you’re probably getting now with any savings you’ve stashed in traditional savings, checking, money market, or CD accounts. 

It’s important to remember, though, that the money you put in your Linus account is not FDIC-insured. Linus has taken some important steps to reduce investors’ risk. Deposits are backed by collateralized assets, which are insured. But in the event of massive economic destabilization, there's no guarantee that Linus's collateralization and insurance will cover your loss. It’s up to each individual investor to decide whether the rewards of opening an account are worth the risk, regardless of how unlikely an economic collapse may seem.